Bragging rights on the soccer pitch aren't the only thing at stake in this weekend's Sounders match against the Portland Timbers; major nerd points are on the line, too.
The staff at Seattle Public Library has challenged their Portland-area "rival," the Multnomah County Library, to a Twitter battle of book recommendations ahead of Saturday's faceoff.
For 90 minutes starting at 4:30 p.m. Thursday (there's no stoppage time in this match), book worms in either city can tweet a title of a book they enjoyed to the libraries' Twitter accounts (@splbuzz, @multcolib) using each city's hashtag: #SEAreads or #PDXreads.
Then librarians in each city will answer those tweets with a suggestion of a different book the reader might enjoy based on his or her past choice. Each recommendation will count as a "goal," and the library with the highest score at 6 p.m. Thursday will claim victory.
Ahead of the big match, SPL's Linda Johns and Andrea Gough indulged us with a practice round, offering suggestions for a few book titles we provided:
"Catcher in the Rye" By J.D. Salinger
?"Sometimes the classics are particularly hard," said Gough. But Johns suggests "King Dork" by Frank Portman.
"He's a musician and I think of it as the anti-'Catcher in the Rye,' because there's a character who's reading 'Catcher in the Rye,' and has a lot against it. But if you've already read and loved 'Catcher in the Rye,' it just makes more sense to you, and that could be fun," she said. "There's also a new book coming out called 'My Salinger Year.' It's coming out in, June and I think it's getting a lot of buzz."
"Ender's Game" By Orson Scott Card
The librarians recommend "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. The book, explains Gough,"has that similar interstellar, galactic war thing going on — and one person who's designated and meant to make sense of it all. Similar character and world-building."
"Ball Four" By Jim Bouton
After pausing for a moment, Johns pulled up this recommendation: "Faithful: Two Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle The Historic 2004 Season" by Stuart O'Nan and Stephen King.
"Stuart O'Nan is a fantastic writer. He mostly writes fiction, but he loves baseball, and he brings that sense of a novelist's approach to a story when he writes non-fiction," she aid.
"Anna Karenina"? By Leo Tolstoy?
"Do you want to read another classic? Something more contemporary, but with that feel?" asked Johns, only to be reminded by a pesky reporter that she'll be doing this on Twitter on Thursday, with little time for follow-up queries. She came up with "Little Big" by John Crowley. "It's Twitter, so I don't have to say why!" she adds with a laugh. "Another goal!"
"The Hunger Games Series" By Suzanne Collins
"There's a good chance that you've already read 'Divergent' by Veronica Roth," said Johns, with not so much as a glance at her computer screen. They get that question a lot at the reader advisory desk.
"Diary of a Wimpy Kid" By Jeff Kinney
"Give the 'Justin Case' series a try," Johns said. "There are a few books in the series at about the same reading level. They're funny; same kind of attitude."
The Seattle Public Library has done this before; they held a similar book recommendations battle with Denver's library ahead of the Seahawks-Broncos matchup in the Super Bowl.
